[/caption]Microsoft will be officially launching Internet Explorer 9 later today. It looks as if it will be the most important Web browser launch this year. It seems that it will be the biggest redesign that Microsoft's browser has ever been through. Users will immediately notice the huge changes in the browser's interface, design and, most importantly, speed.
IE9 has trimmed its interface, it seems, as much as it's newer competitor, Google Chrome. The OneBox (Microsoft's combination of a search box and address bar), the tab bar and the navigation buttons have all been condensed to a single row. The status bar is long gone.
The only problem is that the address bar is on the same level as the tabs. That seems, to me, as a nuisance. I'm on a 24" screen, and I still manage to have enough tabs open that all you can see is the favicon (the little icon that shows up next to the title). That means that if the tabs are on the same level as the address bar, I lose valuable space.
Another new feature of IE9 is the ability to drag favicons to the taskbar in order to create pinned shortcuts. Some site even offer app-style page that can support Windows 7 jumplists. IE9 has been treating sites more like apps. It's an integral part of their modernization strategy, however, unlike Chrome (which allows you to do the same thing) IE doesn't take away any interface elements in "app" mode, whereas creating an "app" in Chrome removes all traces of the browser, except the title bar. This can be useful, but it can also be a nuisance, depending on how you look at it.
The most important feature of the new Internet Explorer, however, is its speed upgrades, and its support for new technologies like HTML5, which has been missing in IE for a while now. IE used to be the slow beast in the browser market.
Continue reading on the next page.
The people who traditionally use IE are people who don't know how to download another browser, or, people who bought a computer in 1999 and haven't downloaded any updates since. Now, it seems that that's about to change. With these new speed, support, design, interface etc. changes, Internet Explorer 9 may be able to take on some of the top browsers such as Chrome 6 and Safari 5.
I'm a loyal Chrome fan, part of is that it's supported across Mac OSX and Linux operating systems, so, it may be a while before I personally adopt IE, however, for average/semi-advanced internet users IE9 may be just the thing. Either way, we're all excited to see how it all turns out. IE9 could be just the thing Microsoft needs to get themselves back in the Internet software market.
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